The present invention relates to a toner cartridge.
Toner cartridges for feeding toner to image forming apparatuses are so designed that the lifetime of consumable items such as sealing members may be sufficiently long compared to the filling amount of the toner. However, since excessively lengthening the lifetime of consumable items causes cost increase, the consumable items of toner cartridges such as sealing members and developing rollers are often set to have the lifetime about 1.5 times to 2 times the filling amount of toner.
Used toner cartridges may be collected and filled with new toner for recycling, and in such cases, toner is often fully refilled without taking into consideration the lifetime of the consumable items of the toner cartridge. Accordingly, consumable items of the recycled toner cartridges may suffer excessive wear, which may lead to deterioration of the imaging quality, taint damage of image forming apparatuses due to toner leakage, and failures such as breakage of image forming apparatuses. In toner cartridges having a developing roller in particular, deterioration of the imaging quality by wear of the developing roller poses a large problem.